Carnivores: Cityscape Review

A number of years from now, humans are colonizing space and expanding across
the galaxy. In their travels they come across a planet inhabited by
dinosaurs, and decide to load a bunch of them onto a ship and use them for a
traveling, interplanetary sideshow. Of course, this turns out to be a
monumentally bad idea, as the ship carrying the dinosaurs crash lands and
releases a bevy of hungry dinosaurs onto a human colony world. This is the
premise behind Carnivores: Cityscape, a first person shooter that puts players
in the role of a mercenary hunting down the escaped dinosaurs, or lets them play
as the meat hungry dinosaurs themselves.

The two campaigns are played as a series of missions either from a dinosaur's
or human's perspective. Each mission opens with a short paragraph
describing the situation, but that's about it for storyline - this is not a game
for those who like a little meat to their stories. As a human, or agent as
the game calls them, you select two weapons from a list of five to go along with
your pistol before entering the mission. These weapons consist of three of
the rifle/shotgun variety, a grenade launcher, and a sniper rifle. That's
it. And don't expect to find any more powerful weapons hidden in the
levels, there aren't any. Why anyone would select the weaker weapons is a
mystery, and you can expect to approach each mission with pretty much the same
two weapons. The extra ammo in the missions is of a generic type that
seems to fit all weapons, so even this is not a consideration when selecting
weapons.

As a dinosaur you have two attacks available: a slash and a pounce that ends
with a slash. As the game progresses you will have the opportunity to play
larger dinosaurs, but the only real change you'll notice is that you become
slower and stronger. Your attack strategy is to run up to every human you
see and start slashing. Because your strategy is so limited as a dinosaur,
the novelty of playing as one will wear off before too long. Carnivores
does have an interesting feature in that as a dinosaur you can feed on your
kills to restore health, but for some reason the designers decided that feeding
required an in-game cutscene. This might look cool at first, but after
seeing your dinosaur feed the exact same way a number of times, the novelty will
wear off and you'll wish that you could somehow skip the scene.

Hunting dinosaurs as an agent suffers from the same problem in holding the
player's long-term interest. Dinosaur attacks consist of head-on charges
right at the player and the lack of variety in the attacks makes hunting
dinosaurs a straight-forward and repetitive exercise. The human AI is not
that much better - they'll jump around a bit as you try to charge them, but they
don't seem to try too hard to avoid you and can't seem to work cooperatively
against you.